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Much of the world is likely wondering, What is going on in America?

The other day, as I walked down 16th Street toward the newly christened Black Lives Matter Plaza next to the White House to check out the peaceful demonstrators, I had this strange dj vu feeling. Who can see the demonstrations in Americas streets without thinking about the late Sixties, when young people took to the streets to protest against the Vietnam War and social injustices, demanding civil rights.

But in 1968, I wasnt in Washington not even close. I was watching from afar, from the other side, behind the Iron Curtain in Budapest, where we were flooded with anti-American, negative propaganda written in Moscow. Still, we youths of Eastern Europe did not buy into the Marxist dream that was force fed to us and wasnt true. The agitprop department could not change our view of America as the country of inspiration and hope. We loved the hippies, and we felt sorry for Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy upon their assassinations, and for Americas Black community in general. But we also loved the countrys skyscrapers, Coca-Cola and Levi jeans. We loved America and we most certainly did not want America to fail.

Those epoch-changing events in the U.S. coincided with our own elevated hope for change in Budapest, Warsaw and across the Eastern bloc, for the chance to loosen the oppressive system, with a temporary pause in the harshness of the regime. The Prague Spring, as we called it, promised the embrace of human rights, more freedom for artistic expression and closeness to the West, where we felt we belonged. Sadly, our hopes were soon crushed when Soviet-Russian tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia on Aug. 21, 1968. Yet we were inspired to keep resisting, to remain hopeful. In 1989, the fall of the Berlin Wall finally opened us to freedom.

The Memorial Day death of George Floyd in Minneapolis and its horrible display of police brutality, on the heels of many other such deaths, sparked demonstrations across the world in solidarity with Americans, including Europe. These demonstrations also bring forth and highlight problems and issues in these other countries. Ironically, yet again, America is showing the way how democracies need to better themselves. Perhaps it is not obvious, but when young people in Europe are angry about the America they see today, it is very much driven by fear that America might slide back, that the America they love to admire is slipping away. When they worry about the U.S., they are scared for their own future.

Like my generation 50 years ago, todays European youths want America to succeed.

It is perhaps a twist of fate that the first American I ever met was a Black man musicianPaul Robeson. As a 12-year-old, my best friend was Billy Hanson, the son of a pastor from Minneapolis, whose brother fled to Sweden to avoid the draft. So, I had plenty of firsthand experience and was never nave about America being perfect. Like many others, I have always understood that it is a work in progress.

No, America is not perfect will never be. Even from our observation point behind the barbed wire in Eastern Europe, we suspected that the America of our imaginations and dreams never existed. We were well aware that at times the ugly face of America rears itself. But the American idea driving this great country is alive and well, attractive and inspiring as ever. Lets keep it that way. Like then, today where many see failure, we also can see strength. Americas immune system is kicking in.

Critics say, But its a different world. For sure, it is that, thanks to U.S. leadership in the past. But the present is always a different world from the past, and we should be driven by our belief that the future of our democracies will be different too. Allowing the U.S. and Europe to drift apart is not an option. That our common values of freedom and democracy create the conditions for a life worth living is not just a throw-away slogan.

In the 1960s, rock-and-roll music helped to provide the message of hope and shaped our worldview, on both sides of the Atlantic. In Eastern Europe, when we listened to our favorite bands on our transistor radios, by way of Radio Free Europe and Voice of America, we could imagine ourselves in New York, Boston, San Francisco. We could pull on a pair of tattered Levi jeans and be one with the demonstrators in those cities. Where is that American soft power today? Where are the messengers of hope?

Do not be mistaken, most Europeans look for leadership, and inspiration, from America. This is important, because they know if American democracy goes down, European democracy will go down with it. That is why, in the end, Europeans are rooting for America.

Andras Simonyi is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and now lives in America. He is the author of the book, Rocking Toward a Free World: When the Stratocaster beat the Kalashnikov. Follow him on Twitter @AndrasSimonyi.

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Here's why Europe, in the end, is rooting for US democracy | TheHill - The Hill

(James Lawler Duggan/Reuters)The filibuster is useful, because it is useful in a democracy to be able to say No to the people and to their duly elected representatives.

NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLEThe Democrats are feeling cocky about their chances in November, not only of seeing off Donald J. Trump to whatever awaits him after the presidency but also of entering 2021 with control of both houses of Congress. That means there is a renewed effort at hand to get rid of the filibuster.

The most important legislative reality for Democrats is that majorities do not last forever, but entitlements do. Thats the lesson of the grievously misnamed Affordable Care Act: If you are willing to take a kamikaze run at the issue, you can dig in deep enough in two years that it will take the opposition 20 years to undo what you have done, if it can be dug out at all. Here is something that Democrats under Barack Obama could boast of that Republicans under Donald Trump cannot: They were committed enough to their one big issue that they were willing to trade the majority for the bill. Commitment to an error is a very limited kind of virtue, but there is something to be said for the follow-through.

If the Democrats enjoy a trifecta in November, expect a hard push for aggressive new income-redistribution schemes, probably linked to punitive (which is not to say effective) new environmental regulations, and, on top of that, a court-packing scheme that would convert the federal judiciary into an engine of left-wing policy permanent, unelected, and unaccountable.

The filibuster has many critics on the right, and they are going to miss it when it is gone.

The original constitutional architecture of these United States was a masterpiece of grace and balance. The framers faced the same problem that has faced many republics in the past: balancing the need for widespread democratic access to political power, which helps to confer legitimacy, with the need for more narrow administration that frustrates and defeats the will of the people when the people have gone mad, as they do from time to time. What they came up with was a mix of democratic and anti-democratic institutions: in the legislative branch, a popularly elected House that serves as the accelerator and an appointed, quasi-aristocratic Senate that serves as the brakes; in the executive, a president who cannot appropriate funds or commit the nation to a treaty but who can veto a piece of legislation, requiring a supermajority to override him a president who in most situations can say No more authoritatively than he can say Yes; in the judiciary, a constitution of enumerated powers fortified by a bill of rights that sets core liberal principles beyond the reach of mere majoritarianism. What this produced was a democracy of one man, one vote on a short leash.

The filibuster is not a constitutional provision it is a creation of the Senate, a rule the upper chamber has set for itself. The principle behind the filibuster is the principle of unlimited debate, the belief that any senator has the right to extend the discussion of any issue to whatever point he deems necessary. That principle enabled a procedural maneuver we now call the filibuster, in which a senator kept speaking about an issue not in order to advance the debate but to prevent a vote. (A filibuster is a pirate, and a legislative filibuster was taken to be a kind of legislative hijacking.) On the advice of President Woodrow Wilson, late of Princeton, the Senate adopted a new rule that allowed senators to cut off debate with a supermajority. The current cutoff point is 60 votes.

Senators are no longer always expected to actually speak for hours on end when they engage in a filibuster, though many of them do: Senator Rand Paul, a critic of domestic surveillance measures and national-security excesses, spent 13 hours blocking the confirmation of John Brennan as CIA director. (Ted Cruz had earlier subjected the Senate to 21 hours of Green Eggs and Ham and other readings. Senator Paul read his colleagues some much less entertaining magazine columns.) But rather than a marathon, the modern filibuster is a kind of trump card a senator can throw on the table to require a 60-vote majority to advance any piece of legislation or the approval of an appointment requiring Senate confirmation.

A filibuster is like any other tool that can be use responsibly or irresponsibly. Such instruments do not usually create new political vices but only magnify existing ones. In the minds of many older Americans, the filibuster is very closely associated with Democrat-led attempts to thwart civil-rights legislation: The longest filibuster in our history was Senator Strom Thurmonds infamous stand, lasting 24 hours and 18 minutes, against a civil-rights bill the Republican bill passed in 1957 under Dwight Eisenhower, not the more famous legislation of 1964. Sometimes, filibusters are used in the face of momentous legislation, and, sometimes, they are used for picayune purposes.

The problem with the filibuster is the problem that inhibits Congress especially and Washington more generally in many obvious and subtle ways: procedural maximalism. In our current adolescent political culture, most political actors do not have the prudence or moral sophistication to know when to press a technical advantage to its limit and when to relent. It was for this reason that the Democrats impeachment of President Trump had so little real moral effect on the American people Trumps impeachment was a foregone conclusion simply because the Democrats had enough votes to impeach him and nothing to hold them back but the good judgment and patriotism of Nancy Pelosi, which do not amount to much. The circuses around our Supreme Court nominations amount to much the same thing: Never mind that these dishonest spectacles undermine the very institutions with which our elected officials are entrusted and that they make effective governance all but impossible: If it can be done, it will be done.

The filibuster is useful, because it is useful in a democracy to be able to say No to the people and to their duly elected representatives. That is why we have a First Amendment, a Second Amendment, and the rest of the Bill of Rights: Nancy Pelosi and Donald Trump cannot be entrusted with fundamental liberties, and neither can we, the jackasses who entrusted them with power. The Senate, especially, is supposed to slow things down, to suffocate democratic passions, and to make strait the gate and narrow the way for destructive popular legislation. The more the Senate comes to resemble the House, the less useful it is. The Senates distinctiveness serves practical rather than aesthetic functions.

Democrats looking to eliminate the filibuster in 2021 should keep in mind that in January 2017 the elected branches of the federal government were under unified Republican control led by Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, and Donald Trump, three representatives of the will of the people to whom Democrats very much wanted to say No. Democrats tell themselves a bedtime story about that that this was not the result of legitimate democracy, which can never fail but can only be failed. That is a superstition, one that James Madison had somehow managed to liberate himself from all the way back in 1787. Madison helped to create a government of checks and balances.

I cannot think of a single thing about Washington today that makes me believe it needs one fewer check.

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We Will Miss the Filibuster - National Review

Written by Ashutosh Varshney | Updated: July 6, 2020 9:23:15 am Indias Muslims are racially similar to the Hindus, but religiously different. (Source: AP)

Are Americas Blacks and Indias Muslims politically comparable? This question has acquired a new salience with the rise of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, underway for weeks in the US, covering several hundred cities. Comparisons have been drawn with the anti-CAA protests in India, lasting three months after mid-December, rebelling against the attempted demotion of Indias Muslims to secondary citizenship. The mainstream Black argument that Blacks have been treated as inferior Americans, with Whites as the putative owners of the nation, is not altogether distinct.

In what ways, then, are Indias Muslims and Americas Blacks similar or different? And are such similarities and differences politically consequential? Blacks, of course, are not religiously distinct from Whites. They are predominantly Christian. In contrast, Indias Muslims are racially similar to the Hindus, but religiously different.

Similarities emerge when we turn to demography and politics. Blacks are a little over 12 per cent of the US population, Muslims slightly over 14 per cent of Indias. Democracies tend to privilege numbers. In conditions of polarisation, racial or religious minorities can get swamped by racial or religious majorities. When a majority of Hindus or Whites vote communally or racially, the threat to minorities can become quite real.

Consider the political arithmetic underlying the proposition above. Hindus are roughly 80 per cent of India, and Whites about 73 per cent of Americas electorate. If 50 per cent of Hindus vote for the BJP, it would constitute 40 per cent of the national vote, which, given a certain geographic distribution, is enough for victory in a parliamentary system, if not in a presidential system. When it won 44 per cent of Hindu vote, the BJP approximated this possibility in 2019. Indeed, only 1.4 per cent of BJPs national vote last year was non-Hindu. That level of Hindu concentration, a voting novelty in India, allowed the Narendra Modi regime to embark on an anti-Muslim legislative frenzy between July and December, culminating in the CAA.

Analogously, if 70 per cent of Whites vote for a racist party in the US, it can easily win the presidential elections, assuming a certain distribution of that vote. Republicans, under Trump, were not too far from this target in 2016, when Trump received 64 per cent of White vote (and only six per cent of the Black vote). After victory, Trump has followed a White racist agenda, and the strategy for November 2020 is also clearly aimed at racial polarisation. He may not, of course, succeed. The BLM protests have been remarkably multi-racial, and polls show a substantial reduction in Trumps White support.

The greatest difference between the US Blacks and Indian Muslims is, of course, historical. The Blacks were brought to the US as slaves, starting 1619. Bought and sold as commodities with no rights, families often split and violence frequently inflicted, they bore the pain of slavery till 1864. After slavery ended, the suffering of the Jim Crow era began, when the recently won equality and voting rights were obliterated, segregation enforced, and lynchings and pogroms unleashed. Finally, after equality and voting rights returned in the mid-1960s, police violence emerged as a method of social control. The nine-minute police knee on George Floyds neck was the wrenching tip of a vast iceberg.

Though the parallel is not exact, untouchability in India came closest to slavery. That is why some social scientists have sought to compare Blacks and Dalits. Muslims were neither forced into slavery, nor untouchability. Between the 11th and 18th centuries, much of India was ruled by Muslim princes. There is no Black parallel in US history. Blacks have been at the bottom of American society for four centuries.

This historical contrast has been undeniably consequential. Muslim princely power has been used by Hindu nationalists to transform the conduct of some Muslim rulers, especially Babur and Aurangzeb, and before them, the invasion of Ghazni and Ghouri, into a larger anti-Muslim political narrative. M S Golwalkars formulation barah sau saal ki ghulami (1,200 years of servitude, thus colonisation starting before the British conquest), which Modi repeatedly articulated when he came to power in 2014, refers to the West and Central Asian invasions from 8th century onwards.

This narrative is very different from the anti-Black narrative of White racism. In the Hindu nationalist narrative, Muslims have always been disloyal to the Indian nation, which in turn is equated with the Hindu majority. Indias partition is presented as the latest proof of Muslim infidelity. It is their everlasting disloyalty which makes Muslims unworthy of equality with the Hindus. In the White supremacist narrative, Blacks are not disloyal to the US which is, of course, viewed as a White nation. But Blacks, for them, are irredeemably inferior, and therefore, entirely undeserving of equality and respect. The two narratives construct unworthiness differently.

Both narratives are fundamentally flawed. The Hindu nationalist narrative errs when it flattens the behavioural plurality of the Muslim princes. The proverbial comparison between Akbar and Aurangzeb the two biggest Mughal emperors belongs to this discursive realm. It is impossible to prove Akbars disloyalty to India, and as for Aurangzeb, even Jawaharlal Nehru wrote, in The Discovery of India, that Aurangzeb set the clock back. No serious historian finds an unbroken chain of Hindu-repression and India-hatred running across centuries of Muslim rule.

More fundamentally, how are Muslim masses implicated in the princely conduct? Why punish them? Historically, Muslim social structure has been bi-modal. A small court-based princely and aristocratic class coexisted with a vast mass of poor Muslims. And in 2005, the Sachar Committee conclusively demonstrated something already intuitively known: That, along with Dalits and Adivasis, Muslims are the poorest community of India.

This is where the Black-Muslim comparison begins to recover its validity. Like Blacks, Indias Muslims are mostly poor and deprived, and like them, they are a minority. After the mid 20th century, a democracy is not a proper democracy unless it safeguards minorities. And if the minorities are also poor, the protection becomes even more necessary. A poor minority deserves empathy and justice, not hatred and repression. It is a morally diminishedand normatively impoverishedsociety, which adopts the latter path..

The writer is Sol Goldman Professor of International Studies and Professor of Political Science at Brown University

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Hindu nationalism, White supremacism threaten to morally impoverish the two democracies - The Indian Express

The Wests normalisation of Sisi is a huge pillar of the stranglehold he has over the lives of every Egyptian.

Today marks the 7th anniversary of the military coup that brought an end to Egypts brief experiment with democracy. The July 3 coup is an area of modern history that is conveniently and woefully neglected by a world that has, with a few noble exceptions, normalised and bolstered the subsequent reign of terror of the triumphant tyrant Abdel Fattah El Sisi.

In a way, its absurd to talk of the coup in the past tense, given it has never really ended. To this day, one could take a brief dip into the modern political scene in Egypt and only witness another instance of the escalation of the perpetual violence that began on July 3, 2013.

Those who fail to see this do so almost entirely deliberately and maliciously. No more is this the case with the so-called democratic West. The tone, as ever, was set by Egypts biggest patron, the US.

It was Obama who refused to call the removal of the democratically elected Mohamed Morsi for what it was, namely a military a coup. Obama knew that if he did so it would mean that, under US law, hed have to stop funding the very military that had just carried out the coup.

Obama was briefly forced to pretend to care about human rights in post-coup Egypt, following the 14th of August, 2013 when Egyptian military and paramilitary forces, funded by the US and so ferociously utilising the military technologies it provides, carried out a massacre of over 1000 pro-democracy protesters at Cairos Rabaa and Nadha squares.

Though there was some handwringing within the Obama administration on the question of renewing military aid, the reality was that the US was simply biding its time, waiting for Sisi to stabilise the country so that normal service of funding Egypt as a key geopolitical ally regardless of the barbarity of the regime could resume.

Stability, no matter how one reads it, meant the violent, murderous destruction of the entire democratic opposition, paving the way for Sisi officially assuming the throne of the presidency.

For this unprecedented violence, the US praised and duly rewarded Sisi with uninterrupted military aid and diplomatic support.

But theres a more viscerally ideological aspect regarding the relation of the July 3 coup to the West. One of the major ways in which the coup was globally justified in its early stages was to depict the democratically elected government as anti-western.

Supporters of the coup had, since essentially the first moment Morsi elected, sought to depict his technocratic, transitional and incrementally reformist government as dangerous Islamists whose ultimate goal was to transform Egypt into an anti-western theocracy.

Egypt is becoming the new Iran, was a popular counter-revolutionary cry, while absurd stories of the Islamization of Egypt flooded the domestic and international media.

Morsi was depicted as being worse than Mubarak on TV stations owned by Mubarak loyalists (feloul).

To this end, figures who were popular in the West but marginal in Egypt, most notably Nobel Peace Prize-winner Mohamed ElBaradei, were recruited to the cause of subverting democracy in Egypt by poisoning the West against Morsi.

Joining him was a plethora of westernised leftists and liberals whose own conception of Egypt is based on the Egypt that Mubarak had surrendered for his own kleptocratic interests to aggressive Westernisation the Egypt of ultra-elite shopping malls, globetrotting between Cairo and Los Angeles, Dubai, London, New York etc. A place where the Egyptian experience is largely restricted to affluent gated communities in Cairo far from the Baladi alien masses with their decidedly un-western traditions, religiosity and cultures.

They advertised to the West a so-called corrective revolution a restricted Egyptian democracy that circumvented the Islamists who had won every single fair and free election since the January 25 revolution.

They knew they couldnt win power by contesting elections, since they had insignificant domestic support; hence why simply voting Morsi out of power was rejected by the so-called opposition. He had to be removed and what he represented, namely the democratic process that led to his presidency, had to be, at the very best, severely cut down to size.

Of course, it was when the bodies started dropping in Rabaa and Nadha that ELBaradei fled in the night away from Sisi and his bloodthirsty coupist comrades his subsequent mea culpas would be more believable if this wasnt a man who understood the ruthlessly anti-democratic and counter-revolutionary nature of the Egyptian Armed Forces before getting into bed with them.

Similarly, there was an exodus of previously pro-coup left-liberals who realised that their feloul and military allies had no inclination for sharing power.

But they had fleetingly served their purpose. Sisis entire selling point to the West has been shaped by the false but mutually expedient secularist-Islamist dichotomy.

Sisi has found almost no better an ally than the European Union, which helped legitimise his fake election, and which provides him with sweetheart trade and weapons deals under the guise of him fighting 'Islamist' terrorism in the Sinai, but which has more to do with his function as a merciless policeman of illegal immigrants trying to penetrate the walls of Fortress Europe.

None of this about making tired anti-Western arguments, but the July 3 coup against democracy and its perceived irrelevance in Western considerations of Egypt is something that is hugely relevant to the lives of Egyptians today.

To illustrate it in the most graphic terms when, last year, the Palacegate protests erupted, it was with German, French and American weaponry that the regime viciously repressed the protesters. When Sisi carries out war crimes in the Sinai, he does so with US and European weaponry.

The Wests normalisation of Sisi is a huge pillar of the stranglehold that he and the kleptocracy he represents has over the lives of every Egyptian.

The Sisi regime is a bastion of backwardness, having one of the worst human rights records on earth it is rapidly pulling Egypt deeper into a political and economic abyss.

Every totalitarian lunge backwards every killing, every execution, every act of torture, every indefinite detention without trial and every voice viciously censored is done so with the full and unwavering support of the democratic West.

Disclaimer: The viewpoints expressed by the authors do not necessarily reflect the opinions, viewpoints and editorial policies of TRT World.

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The West's role in ending Egypt's short-lived democracy - TRT World

Published 6 July 2020

After more than 200 years, Thomas Muir of Huntershill has been restored to the roll of the Faculty of Advocates following a successful plea by Ross Macfarlane QC.

Muir was an advocate and political reformer in late eighteenth-century Scotland who, during an age of revolution, promoted democratic ideas including support for universal suffrage, which were seen by some as subversive.

Muir practised as an advocate from 1787 until being struck off in 1793 following his indictment by Lord Braxfield of the High Court of Justiciary on the charge of sedition. While he was facing trial, and was a fugitive from justice, the Faculty expelled him from membership. He was brought to trial, convicted, and sentenced to transportation, before escaping to America and revolutionary France in pursuit of his political campaigns, where he died in 1799 at the age of 33.

Muirs sentencing sparked a controversy that has persisted until the present day. Soon after his trial, concerns were being expressed that the political climate of the times had resulted in an unacceptable erosion of civil liberties, and in the 1840s a monument was erected in Calton Cemetery in memory of Muir and the other political martyrs of the time. Muir has since become known as the father of Scottish democracy for his exploits.

Mr Macfarlanes submission to the former Dean of Faculty, Gordon Jackson QC, centred on his discovery of key documents that proved a decree of fugitation lodged against Muir had never held legal effect and so voided the grounds for his expulsion from Faculty.

Mr Macfarlane showed that the decree against Muir had been reponed by an interlocutor of the Court of Session six months after being issued due to Muirs inability to make the trial by the High Court, during which he was sentenced as a fugitive. As the only reason for Muirs expulsion from Faculty, Mr Macfarlane moved that the granting of this appeal should now enable his restoration.

In his letter reinstating Muir to Faculty, Mr Jackson said: On any view of it, the trial and conviction of Muir fell far short of any notions of fairness and the due processes of Scots law.

Mr Jackson described Mr Macfarlanes work as being in the proud traditions of the Faculty of Advocates in their quest for justice, their dogged and meticulous research methods and the persuasive quality of their argument.

Mr Macfarlane said: Muir was passionate, eloquent and charismatic, albeit perceived as anti-establishment in his own time.

And on the matter of his reinstatement to Faculty, I cant do better than leave the last word to Muir himself: I have dedicated myself to the cause of the people. It is a good cause. It shall ultimately prevail. It shall finally triumph.

SLN managing editor Graham Ogilvy said: Those with an interest in Thomas Muir might like to know that a plaque of the Scottish advocate adorns the walls of the Cuban embassy in London.

A copy of the plaque was given to me by the late sculptor Ian Swann after the original was presented to the Cuban ambassador to commemorate Muirs time as a prisoner of the Spanish in Havana after his rescue from Indians on the Yucatn peninsula, where he had been shipwrecked.

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'Father of Scottish democracy' Thomas Muir of Huntershill restored to roll of Faculty - Scottish Legal News